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Home » Competition and markets » Many people were warning about competition in the NHS long before Polly Toynbee. Me for example.

Many people were warning about competition in the NHS long before Polly Toynbee. Me for example.



David Nicholson

Many people were warning about competition in the NHS long before Polly Toynbee this morning.

Me for example.

There are very few people who registered this issue as such a big issue while devoting reams and reams to talking about English health policy.

Dr Tomlinson’s blogpost is a MASSIVE exception – from 2011.

Here it is.

Later than Dr Tomlinson, at the turn of the year, I too wrote a blogpost about how a little appreciated clause in the Health and Social Care Act (2012) would lock the NHS into a competitive market based on price competitive tendering. I cannot claim credit for how this nightmare had entered my head.

The academic who alerted me to how this clause works is Dr Lucy Reynolds. She explained to me why the clause was so significant in making the NHS run on the basis of competitive tendering in the market, and asked me to look out for the Regulations which subsequently appeared.

Lucy doesn’t know I’m writing this, but she was right. A few in the Socialist Health Association publicly queried what the fuss was about, as the policy appeared at first blush to go no further than the competition and cooperation policy of the last Labour government. But all the ‘scare stories’ came to fruition, and nobody had the dignity to admit it.

I remember I was much derided myself about the blogpost from ‘experts’ in public health. They lunged at me asking me to defend the article, some in a rather unpleasant way.

Prof Allyson Pollock had gone out of her way to explain brilliantly why the competition healthcare experts were barking up the wrong tree years ago.

Less than a year on, I have blogged on the passage of the regulations through the legislature, and even why competition was always a flawed policy plank for the NHS.

I have even blogged on things which haven’t even happened, on how a more useful approach might be to embrace “co-epetition“. I have warned about how bundling in integration may even offend competition law, and how the “prime contractor model” continues to pose problems for legal liability.

And yet I continue to be derided for my input there. My crime is that I do not shill for the Conservative party or any right-wing ideology. I do not present at think tanks, like Kaiser Permanente have done most recently. I’ll let you do your own enquiries where.

It came as a genuine surprise to me that David Nicholson was blaming competition lawyers. To make this claim, you either do so innocently, negligently or fraudulently.

But I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Presumption of innocence is very important in the law.

This policy has cost the NHS a lot of waste. The cost of the implementation of the Health and Social Care Act has been estimated at £3bn thus far. But the consequences of implementing this competitive market are more dire.

About a decade ago, Prof Carol Propper wrote papers on the importance of the market and how it could be regulated. We know have this costly reorganisation and Monitor. But Propper was not the only one.

Journalists, politicians and NHS leaders have all been complicit in turning this agenda into a living dream. Baroness Williams with the help of Liberal Democrat competition lawyer colleagues were able to argue the case for competition law replacing what had gone before.

It’s either me or them?

Thanks to people like Dr Jonathon Tomlinson, Dr Marie-Louise Irvine, Dr Charles West, Dr David Wrigley, Val Hudson, Caroline Molloy, Prof Clare Gerada, Dr Kailash Chand, Dr Jacky Davis, Clive Peedell, Sian Rabi-Laleh, John Hully, Prof Ray Tallis, Prof Allyson Pollock, David Skidmore, and Prof Colin Leys, I came to realise it’s not, in fact, me.

I cannot even begin to explain what a waste of time I feel my efforts have been. But I will soldier on regardless with blogging for this Association which is proud to promote a policy based on universality, free at the point-of-need.

 

@legalaware

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  • http://gravatar.com/defytheeconomy defytheeconomy

    http://www.ethosjournal.com/topics/public-service-delivery/item/142-public-or-private?

    This was you in the Serco in house magazine. Your amnesia is chronic Polly,

  • http://twitter.com/mjh0421 Mervyn Hyde (@mjh0421)

    Firstly, keep going Shibley, an honest appraisal of what is happening to us will eventually win over the deceit of market philosophy.

    Secondly here is the link to Dr Lucy Reynolds who speaks in plain language what every person in this country needs to know.

    Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkTnCtg_Omk

    The last thing is, we need to understand that there is nothing a sovereign national government can’t do. It is just down to the will of that government to do it.

    If they privatise it, we can re-nationalise it, no matter what regulations they put in place.

    Any politician that says otherwise is not telling the truth. Or what is the point of government if it can’t represent it’s people?

  • http://legal-aware.org/ Shibley

    very many thanks to both of you.

  • http://gravatar.com/jenw17 jenw17

    A bit unfair. We are all on the same side, and should not fight each other.
    Another article by Polly written in 2010

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jul/06/nhs-survive-lansley-volcano-ideology

  • http://legal-aware.org/ Shibley

    Indeed.
    I note your article doesn’t mention competition.
    Some of us are all on the same side now.

  • http://twitter.com/mjh0421 Mervyn Hyde (@mjh0421)

    The problem with personalities is that we all think that because some political figures are good at telling us what we want to hear, we confuse that with believing they are on our side.

    I met Shirley Williams campaigning in Gloucester when she was a Labour minister, she was softly spoken and had a pleasant demeanor, only not long after, she left Labour, to set up the SDP. Now in collaboration with the Tories has been instrumental in privatising the NHS, If anyone knows her mother’s history, I have no doubt her mother would be turning in her grave if she knew what her daughter had done.

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